Cloud Trailblazers: 10 for 2013

The writing is on the wall: The infrastructure that supported the web in its early days is no longer up to the job. As we depend more on the internet — let’s just give in and call it the cloud — the companies that are providing the underlying computing power to support services like Facebook, Google and Amazon Web Services are remaking the hardware and software on which those services depend. In doing so, they have changed the culture inside IT organizations, disrupted old-line businesses and made it easier than ever to build a web-based business.

We’ve documented those shifts for the last six years at our GigaOM Structure conference and in our reporting on the site, but this year we’re looking ahead. We’ve found ten up-and-coming people who are already planning the next generation of infrastructure. These men and women are solving problems most companies aren’t even anticipating yet.

We’re talking about problems like how to apply data to healthcare outcomes using high performance computing, or writing a new type of programming framework for making real-time web pages. Some are taking their programming skills and thinking about embedding privacy settings in the programming framework instead of something people code by hand. Others are tackling the issue of next-generation databases and storage.

Today, we’re pushing infrastructure to the limits with our demands for real-time information and connections between users and services that can number in the thousands. We just assume that someone, somewhere is doing the hard work to make all this possible.

The Cloud Trailblazers are those people. Read on to meet them and check out the videos of them epxlaining their technologies that we’ve embedded in their stories. Also, come to our Structure conference on June 19 and 20th in San Francisco to see them speak and meet them face to face. The IT world is changing, these people will help you keep up.